Dane Cook Pilots the Wrong Vehicle

Dane Cook is a funny guy. A really funny guy. Okay, if he were to show up on my doorstep with a single white rose I would more than likely turn gay for him. It’s something about his energy and his willingness to put himself out on a limb in so many facets of entertainment that makes me truly respect the man. His comedy specials, his CDs, his website, his movies, and his...television show? All right, I guess 80 percent isn’t a bad batting average.

Cooked is Dane’s attempt at creating a TV show out of his own standup act a la Seinfeld or Home Improvement. He even goes so far as to ape Seinfeld’s idea of having his character be a struggling comedian, which only services the plot as a way for Cook to toss out random jokes on a whim (he takes a small amp and microphone to his office job and stands up on his desk to spew lame one-liners at his fellow employees? Really?) But he takes the life-imitating-art meta-realism up a notch by having his character be a struggling comedian who JUST GOT CAST IN A SITCOM. Sounds like a great premise for a Curb Your Enthusiasm type of comedy to flourish. But sadly, Cook is not on par with Jerry Seinfeld’s smooth and natural delivery–heck, he’s not even on the same level as Tim Allen. Instead, Cook’s “acting” is nothing but a canned delivery of his old jokes, but simply in a new, watered-down way.

In the first episode of Cooked, Dane stars as a comedian being cast in a sitcom. In the second episode of Cooked, Dane stars as a slacker who drags his friends into assorted shenanigans. Neither role stretches too far outside of his comfort zone. Neither role is funny. Both are borderline annoying. At its best, Cooked’s plot is super-convoluted and revoltingly forced. At its worst, it’ll make you want to, in Dane’s own words, want to “go out and start punching babies.” This is the show that will make you realize how wonderfully smart and subtle The King of Queens is. There’s no reason for the things that happen in the show to happen at all, other than to provide Cook the opportunity to gesticulate is way into an unfunny seizure of dusty jokes. To show the extent of how far Cook will go to work his standup act into the situations of each show, we have to look no further than the monkey. On Retaliation, Cook told a joke about how awesome it would be to own an evil pet monkey and to then dress it up in armor and have fights with it. The joke was funny. Recreating that joke into an actual 13 minute skit involving a sword-bearing spider monkey, however, is not.

How do the other actors stack up alongside Cook’s flat, lifeless performance? Not too well, to say the least. Joel Moore plays Mike, one of Dane’s friends who gets dragged into aforementioned shenanigans. You’ll recognize Joel as the geek from Dodgeball (no, not Justin Long. The other one). His performance really lacks the finesse and sly logic of his Dodgeball role, and thus does not allow him to portray the character with the same believability and depth. Just kidding. It’s exactly the same, but with a little less dorkiness and a little more agitation. The only decent acting nod goes to Kristina Anapau who plays Sydney, Cook’s love interest. The mere fact that she was able to get naked and pretend to engage in foreplay while a well-armored monkey waves a sword around in the background is applaudable. Still, her tiny role isn’t enough to salvage the remainder of the cast’s borderline-obnoxious performances.

Honestly, the only time I even let out an audible chuckle was during the deleted scenes, wherein Dane and his two friends, Mike and Dakota, pretend to have lost a child in an empty convenience store. The situation has absolutely no context with it–but then again, neither do any of the other scenes that weren’t cut from the actual episodes–but it stands as a pretty funny and obtuse idea. “Benjamin, I’m sitting with the jelly. I’m sitting with the jelly, Benjamin. Right where I always am. Please come find me!”

If you’re thinking that you can’t go wrong with a purchase so long as Dane Cook’s name appears somewhere on it...please, for yourself, think again.